Christine Göttler is currently writing a book entitled “Fluid Worlds,” which explores Rubens’s engagement with the global world of seventeenth-century Antwerp and the city’s long history of craftsmanship, material expertise, and (hidden) knowledge. She is also working with Sven Dupré on the volume “Reading the Inventory: The Worlds and Possessions of the Portuguese Merchant-Banker Emmanuel Ximenez (1564–1632) in Antwerp,” where the focus is on the converso merchant-banker’s involvement in the city’s artisanal, commercial, and scholarly culture.
She continues to do research and publish on early modern elemental imaginaries and the ways in which artists thought of and pictured hidden natural and supernatural forces.
Publications
"Jan Brueghel il Vecchio e il mito di Anversa," in I Brueghel: Le origini dei generi pittorici in Europa, exh. cat., Palazzo Reale, Milan, ed. Bernard Aikema and Carlotta Striolo (Milan: 24 Ore Culturale, 2026), 35–43 (forthcoming).
"Fire, Sulfur, Salt: Elemental Transformation in Depictions of the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah," in Elemental Forces: Properties, Combinations, and Transformations, ed. Thalia Allington-Wood, Sophie Morris, Claudia Swan, and Rebecca Zorach (Leiden: Brill, 2026); forthcoming.
Activities and Events
Sacred Sensoria: Jewish and Christian Embodied Experience in Early Modern Europe, organized by Yaakov A. Mascetti, Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, Jerusalem, October 25–28, 2026: "Staging Salvation: Sacred Performances in the Church of the Discalced Carmelites in Antwerp. A Saint, a Benefactor, a Monak, and a Physician in Dispute."
Université de Genève, Histoire de l'art, Actualité de la recherche: "Conversions mondiales: Pierre Paul Rubens, le roi Philippe IV d'Espagne et les monnayeurs d'Anvers," November 11, 2026
Host, Relic, Image: Signification and Materiality in Early Modern Christianity, organized by Walter S. Melion, Wietse de Boer, and Anna Dlabačová, Emory University, Lovis Corinth Symposium, December 3–5, 2026: “(Im)material abundance in uncertain times: The chapel of Francisco Lopes Franco y Feo and Mariana Franca in the church of the Friars Minor in Antwerp (ca. 1650).”
Mercator Fellow, DFG Research Group "Geistliche Intermedialität," University of Hamburg, Winter Semester 2027/28 (October to March)